Jen Dalton interviews Ebon Fisher
on the AlulA Dimension and
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

JD: When did you come to Williamsburg [Brooklyn]?

EF: I've been in Williamsburg since 1989. I started doing media rituals
at Minor Injury Gallery in 1990 and 91. With the help of Kevin Pyle and
Kit Blake we were putting on community meetings using media -something I
called a "Media Compression." The idea was to share information in
groups just like you would in circular, democratic information-sharing
systems -but using media as an integral part of it. People could bring
slides, video and audio tapes, we had fax machines set up. My idea was
to create a sort of SOCIAL ORGANISM–to integrate all the information
and to come to terms with it as a group, as if information were alive
and not objective. To my mind we were weaving a social organism in
relation to the information. We did it on Sunday evening once a month
for about six months.

At the time there was a collective up on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg
called Brand Name Damages. There were a lot of students from Pratt
involved. It was very art school-y; the students were all making clever
art history references to Beuys and Koons, whereas the slightly older
crowd focused around Minor Injury were trying to strike out toward
something really new and original and not be stuck in the art history
thing.

My idea was to explore the world as we find it, as it is. Science is a
daily experience, media is a daily experience, the neighborhood is a
daily experience. This is what we're confronted with now. That art stuff
is a very academic push-button kind of charade, it's not very sincere.
To be open and alive and sincere is to work with the world as you find
it, complete with its raging science subculture and the neighborhood and
the community and having a real life. I think because Williamsburg is
isolated from Manhattan, it was entirely possible to do this. We were
running into each other all the time. At that time it was a small enough
scene that all the creatoids basically knew each other. We were putting
on these huge warehouse parties, where thousands of people would come,
and the word got out and the community has more than quadrupled in size.
It's become alienating again –there's so many different scenes and
nobody really talks to each other with the same sense of shared
zeitgeist. And all the art galleries that have set up shop here in
Williamsburg are all back to the formula–They're not really adventurous
and exploring sincerely and openly the world as they find it. They're
being very professional. It's understandable, people have to make a
living somehow. All these new galleries are kind of back a few steps, to
old media. When I was being shown at Test-Site in 1992, I encouraged the
director of the gallery to launch a little media store at the front
which sold books by Williamsburg's Autonomedia collective and early
floppy-disk zines like "Narco Satanicus" by Scott Alexander, and Jamie
Levy's "Cyber Rag." I think we had the only digital store of the kind in
all of New York, with the exception, perhaps, of Gen Ken's Generator.
Anyway, Williamsburg's new galleries are back to the analog thing.

JD: I think since a lot of those galleries are new, they're interested
in being professional in order to garner initial respect. They don't
want to appear tentative, or temporary.

EF: If they really want respect, they can make waves in a smart ways.
They don't have the fire in the belly really, I don't think they have
the same radical energy as the people who were here working in the early
90s. The new [interdisciplinary] space Galapagos is really going to be
an alternative to the galleries here.

JD: Could you explicitly explain what AlulA refers to? It's all a bit
confusing.

EF: Well the word refers to the bastard feather on the elbow of a bird.
It's used to sense the wind. AlulA is a world into which I'm bringing a
lot of my investigations into information systems. It's multimedia; it
exists in physical space here in my home, in a comic book, and on my
website at Al Arthur and Ruth Kahn's Outpost, and I'm making a video of
it. Ebon motions to the room-sized white cube he has built in his
apartment, each side of which is punctured by a small windowlike hole.
These passages fictionally lead out to other rooms that look like this
one. Each of these rooms is a node in the matrix. Characters in AlulA
structure their behaviour, in part, using the bionic codes. The bionic
codes are structures that are based on the media rituals I've been
doing. These codes are also out in a variety of media–they're
circulating in the media on t-shirts, stickers and web animations. What
I'm doing is putting AlulA and its codes out into the world and growing
them in people's minds. You might say it's reversing the corporate
merchandising formula. Instead of starting with a movie, I make all the
merchandise first and a world emerges out of that. Maybe I'll find the
funding for the video, but in a sense, only snippets of video are really
necessary. Besides, AlulA grows like a weed, not a bloody corporate
jihad like Walt Disney. You know how Walt Disney movies are made:
they're movies made by a committee of 9 executives and one art director.
It's not exactly an inspired ensemble.

[…]

I'm trying to work as a radical pop artist. Of course, Wired magazine
eats the bionic codes up, although they turned their text pink. Ever
since they found out about the AlulA project, they've been a wonderful
resource. I treat the media like a living plasma, a techno-cultural
substance that my work floats around in. To me, this [he holds up
Jonathan Fineberg's "Art Since 1940," in which Fisher is featured] is
just some sort of cellular unit that AlulA flows in. But to me, this [he
holds up an AlulA t-shirt] is just as important. To me, street culture
is so essential to life. If you don't walk down the street and talk to
your neighbors and hang out and circulate, there's no public culture.
It's the last place where we have any sort of public sharing and
dealing. It's hard to deal with the public. Many people just try to
escape it and crawl into their jobs and their suburban homes and their
art studios and don't want to deal with it. But it's civilization's
loss, we have to deal with each other. Besides, it's fun.

JD: I so appreciate that argument for socializing. So many artists I
know, of all types, think it's unnecessary to spend time with other
people socially, which I think is crucial to intellectual growth–and
besides, it's fun.

EF: Some artists are a victim of 20th century art fashion, which is that
the soul of the individual matters more than anything else. The whole
computer culture which I'm very involved with is very critical of this
myth of individualism. On the web, collective authorship is always
occurring, with hypertext and links between web sites. If you're a
reader and you're going through the web, essentially you're constructing
a different story every time. There's a combination of all these
different authors. It's as if you're walking down the street and
stopping and talking to each person you encounter. It's oral culture
which is the original literature–which is Homer. I think that what's
going on with new media is this radical reappraisal of what information
and communication and culture is. And for people who are involved with
new media, it's like a plunger has gone down their throat and worked the
shit out of their bodies and they're cleaned out and ready to deal with
the universe and consider what *being* is, not just what *art* is. What
does it mean to be? Period. It's kind of hilarious that the goddamn
fashion industry took the phrase "Be," like the cologne CK Be, and just
walloped a whole generation upside the head with the possibility. But
bless them for doing it, because they just went dodging all around the
psyche of youth with a hugely successful marketing campaign. Why can't
artists do that, but with a little more subtlety?

With AlulA, I'm building a metaphor for communications. I want to
develop rituals and portray them in a really pop fashion, showing
conflict resolution and etiquette. Another one of the myths of art is
this notion that we have to keep breaking things apart. There's a lot of
dissolution and hostility and breaking and rupturing and aggression. I
was raised a Quaker, so I have a peace-oriented tradition that
completely bypasses the arts. I don't really need the arts for spiritual
sustenance. I can't imagine what it's like to be 18 years old and only
have Damien Hirst, "Natural Born Killers," and "Pulp Fiction" for
spiritual guidance. Bleh.

[…]

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Ebon Fisher
NERVE CIRCLE CREATIONS
alula@interport.net

phone/Ireland: 011-44-1504-268-768
phone/Brooklyn: 001-718-782-2180

WEBSITE: http://www.users.interport.net/~outpost/ebon.html
WIGGLISM: http://artnetweb.com/port/wigglism
ORGANISM: http://www.artnetweb.com/organism
AlulA/VRML 3D: http://www.vrmill.com/alula/alula.wrl
BIONIC CODEX: http://www.echonyc.com/~sandbox/codes/index.html

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